Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Cfp: "Human Experience and Nature: Examining the Relationship between Phenomenology and Naturalism," University of the West of England, August 31-September 2, 2011.

This conference aims to bring together prominent thinkers from phenomenology and other fields in philosophy, to discuss the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism. This relationship may vary from one field to another. It may be that phenomenology is compatible with naturalism in the philosophy of science, while the two approaches are incompatible in ethics. It would be interesting to examine whether this is the case and if so, why?

The conference aims to capture phenomenology’s main ideas in an accessible and non-jargonistic way, in order to provide an introduction to this rich tradition to philosophers working in other traditions. The conference also aims to examine phenomenology’s metaphysical underpinnings. It will ask: does phenomenology have a metaphysical commitment, and if so, what kinds of metaphysical commitments are compatible with phenomenology? Is there a restriction on the type of metaphysical view one may hold while practising phenomenology?

A final theme in the conference will be the question whether phenomenology is compatible with naturalism. A case in point is cognitive science, where the application of phenomenology has recently become popular, sometimes without sufficient attention to what conflicts there might be between phenomenology and the naturalistic basis of cognitive science. The invited speakers hold very different views on this issue. The conference will close with a roundtable discussion of this issue.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)